Club Management: The Resource for Successful Club Operations

Westmoor Club of Nantucket, MA: A Place to Call Home

Club Management: The Resource for Successful Club Operations

October, 2005

The story of today's Westmoor Club properly begins when architect and life-long Nantucket resident J. Graham Goldsmith paid a simple, yet fateful trip to the Egan's property one day in 2003. Goldsmith had been working on some residential projects in the area and had remembered the property from its days as the Westmoor Inn. The Egan's, who were currently running Westmoor, weren't looking to sell the property at the time, but he decided to take his chances and knocked on the door nonetheless. A light bulb went off, and two-and-a-half hours later Goldsmith had sketched out some plans and the road to success took its toll from there.

The current state of the private club market in Nantucket included two very old-line, private clubs; the Nantucket Yacht Club and Sankaty Head Gold Club. These clubs had existed for three generations and had gotten to the point with their legacy memberships that they simply didn't have the resources to take on new members. Interestingly, it was J. Graham Goldsmith's great-grandfather who teamed up with David Gray and a small group of Natucketers to form the Sankaty Club back in 1921. Since Nantucket is very much a second-home community, Goldsmith felt that it needed a new place for these people to become connected and form friendships with other families while they enjoyed their stay on the island year after year.

By Memorial Day of 2004, Westmoor was able to close on the land and quickly moved to set the design and the marketing of the club into motion. Once the ball got rolling, everyone worked hard to get the job done. There were 180 crew members working six to seven days per week through rain, shine, and sometimes even 36-inches of snow. There were painters working from midnight to 5:30 a.m. so they could stay out of the way of the contractors during the day. The intense schedule paid off, because in less than a year after starting construction, all 53,000 square feet of Westmoor's newly renovated facilities were opened by September 2004.

In Goldsmith's letter to prospective members when recruitment first began, he made the following remarks in relation to his great-grandfather's founding of Sankaty Head Gold